Egypt and the Non-Aligned Movement

The preparatory meeting for the First NAM Conference in Belgrade was held in Cairo between 5 and 12 June 1961.

[1] The first NAM conference was cosponsored between President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser and President of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito who sent joint letter to other leaders during their bilateral meeting in Egypt.

[4] Official Egyptian state institutions view the movement as the broadest and the most important framework for developing countries to coordinate their stances on issues on the agenda of the United Nations and to act together against unilateral policies.

[5] President Gamal Abdel Nasser, together with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia played the leading role in the early days of the movement.

[8] This initiative was opposed by India and Yugoslavia as a matter of principle with Yugoslavia underlining its dissatisfaction with Egyptian failure to ensure earlier Arab common stance for the Camp David negotiations.